"The boxes,"Trent suggested,"must be very hot now!"He turned down a side-walk away from the stand towards an empty seat under an elm-tree,and,after a moment's scarcely perceptible hesitation,she followed his lead.He laughed softly to himself.
If this was defeat,what in the world was better?
"This is your first Ascot,is it not?"she asked.
"My first!"
"And your first defeat?"
"I suppose it is,"he admitted cheerfully."I rather expected to win,too.""You must be very disappointed,I am afraid.""I have lost,"he said thoughtfully,"a gold cup.I have gained -"She half rose and shook out her skirts as though about to leave him.
He stopped short and found another conclusion to his sentence.
"Experience!"
A faint smile parted her lips.She resumed her seat.
"I am glad to find you,"she said,"so much of a philosopher.Now talk to me for a few minutes about what you have been doing in Africa."He obeyed her,and very soon she forgot the well dressed crowd of men and women by whom they were surrounded,the light hum of gay conversation,the band which was playing the fashionable air of the moment.She saw instead the long line of men of many races,stripped to the waist and toiling as though for their lives under a tropical sun,she saw the great brown water-jars passed down the line,men fainting beneath the burning sun and their places taken by others.She heard the shrill whistle of alarm,the beaten drum;she saw the spade exchanged for the rifle,and the long line of toilers disappear behind the natural earthwork which their labours had created.She saw black forms rise stealthily from the long,rank grass,a flight of quivering spears,the horrid battle-cry of the natives rang in her ears.The whole drama of the man's great past rose up before her eyes,made a living and real thing by his simple but vigorous language.That he effaced himself from it went for nothing;she saw him there perhaps more clearly than anything else,the central and domineering figure,a man of brains and nerve who,with his life in his hands,faced with equal immovability a herculean task and the chances of death.Certain phrases in Fred's letter had sunk deep into her mind,they were recalled very vividly by the presence of the man himself,telling his own story.She sat in the sunlight with the music in her ears,listening to his abrupt,vivid speech,and a fear came to her which blanched her cheeks and caught at her throat.The hand which held her dainty parasol of lace shook,and an indescribable thrill ran through her veins.She could no more think of this man as a clodhopper,a coarse upstart without manners or imagination.In many ways he fell short of all the usual standards by which the men of her class were judged,yet she suddenly realised that he possessed a touch of that quality which lifted him at once far over their heads,The man had genius.
Without education or culture he had yet achieved greatness.By his side the men who were passing about on the lawn became suddenly puppets.Form and style,manners and easy speech became suddenly stripped of their significance to her.The man at her side had none of these things,yet he was of a greater world.She felt her enmity towards him suddenly weakened.Only her pride now could help her.
She called upon it fiercely.He was the man whom she had deliberately believed to be guilty of her father's death,the man whom she had set herself to entrap.She brushed all those other thoughts away and banished firmly that dangerous kindness of manner into which she had been drifting.
And he,on his part,felt a glow of keen pleasure When he realised how the events of the day had gone in his favour.If not yet of her world,he knew now that his becoming so would be hereafter purely a matter of time.He looked up through the green leaves at the blue sky,bedappled with white,fleecy clouds,and wondered whether she guessed that his appearance here,his ownership of Iris,the studious care with which he had placed himself in the hands of a Seville Row tailor were all for her sake.It was true that she had condescended to Bohemianism,that be had first met her as a journalist,working for her living in a plain serge suit and a straw hat.But he felt sure that this had been to a certain extent a whim with her.He stole a sidelong glance at her -she was the personification of daintiness from the black patent shoes showing beneath the flouncing of her skirt,to the white hat with its clusters of roses.Her foulard gown was as simple as genius could make it,and she wore no ornaments,save a fine clasp to her waistband of dull gold,quaintly fashioned,and the fine gold chain around her neck,from which hung her racing-glasses.She was to him the very type of everything aristocratic.It might be,as she had told him,that she chose to work for her living,but he knew as though by inspiration that her people and connections were of that world to which he could never belong,save on sufferance.He meant to belong to it,for her sake -to win her!He admitted the presumption,but then it would be presumption of any man to lift his eyes to her.He estimated his chances with common sense;he was not a man disposed to undervalue himself.He knew the power of his wealth and his advantage over the crowd of young men who were her equals by birth.For he had met some of them,had inquired into their lives,listened to their jargon,and had come in a faint sort of way to understand them.It had been an encouragement to him.
After all it was only serious work,life lived out face to face with the great realities of existence which could make a man.In a dim way he realised that there were few in her own class likely to satisfy Ernestine.He even dared to tell himself that those things which rendered him chiefly unfit for her,the acquired vulgarities of his rougher life,were things which he could put away;that a time would come when he would take his place confidently in her world,and that the end would be success.And all the while from out of the blue sky Fate was forging a thunderbolt to launch against him!
